Even more about Barbara Cartland: novelist and plagiarist

 

 

 

Barbara Cartland has become a blog obsession over recent weeks. We have had Matthew Sweet’s marvellous biography:

Barbara Cartland: Give Pink a Chance

Which then brought out Daniel Milford Cottam’s incredible pictures of her clothes:

Barbara, the clothes, and a guest on the blog

… and now we’re moving on to Barbara Cartland’s literary oeuvre.

The books. Well. I had read some of her autobiographies (she wrote a few…) which are very enjoyable for the detail and the picture of life.

She wrote contemporary romances, and also historical fiction, often set in the Regency period. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of them: Matthew Sweet says she maintained “her literary output with the zeal of a tractor factory during Stalin’s first Five Year Plan.”

She used to say sometimes in interviews that for every historical book she wrote, she read 10 books for research. This raises two questions:

1) Do we believe that she read ten for one?

2) How many of those research books were by Georgette Heyer?

It seems unarguable that there was a lot of ‘borrowing’ politely or plagiarism (less politely) going on. Heyer’s books are famously full of her Regency slang and incomprehensible descriptions of this and that, and they certainly turn up in Cartland’s books in a blatant way. And such of the Regency books that I’ve dipped into show every sign of being a mish-mash of Heyer plots. There is a very egregious example in Cartland’s The Knave of Hearts, which leans heavily on Heyer’s These Old Shades. Sweet demonstrates all this very clearly, drawing on biographies of Heyer – the earlier book by Jane Aiken Hodge did not name Cartland, it just said ‘another novelist’ was involved. A later biography, I believe, was explicit.

Apparently Heyer said “I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate.” A solicitor’s letter was sent: no response received, but the copying apparently stopped. Heyer, who abhorred publicity and her fans, was not prepared to go to court.

I am a huge fan of These Old Shades. Heyer said “I think ill enough of Shades…” but I think most of her fans would disagree. But the one thing I always hated was Leonie offering herself as mistress to her beloved

‘Monseigneur, I never thought that you would marry me’ she said simply ‘But – if you wanted me – I thought perhaps you would – take me – until I wearied you.’

This was a level of self-abasement too far for me (when I was 13 and now): it is a real shame that it is reproduced in The Knave of Hearts in exactly the same manner.

“I have never, in my most secret dreams imagined that you might marry me – but I have thought that perhaps until you wearied of me, I might come to you and be your woman. If you would love me and make me yours, even for a short while, I would be happy for the rest of my life.”

The two books are not identical – there is no dressing up as a boy, one of the joys of Shades. But you would be absolutely certain that Cartland had read Shades.  

The story rattles along with almost too much plot

 “Grandmama, I have lost Ravella.”

The old lady sat up straight in her chair. “Lost her?” she queried. “Has she been kidnapped again?”

Well might she ask. There are highwaymen and gypsies and bad-tempered singers and unwise unchaperoned visits to all kinds of places – not all of it lifted from Heyer. Ravella is a restless character who never does what she is told and is immensely irritating, quite apart from the awfulness of calling the Duke ‘Guardie’ (short for Guardian). At least Leonie calls her Duke ‘Monseigneur’.

(Though because of this book I always specially enjoyed in the Wolf Hall books how everyone excoriates Anne Boleyn’s father for wanting to have that title).

The local village has the unfortunate name of Mildew, and the agent is called Gristle – do you think he is going to be a goody or a baddy?

Something they have in common with Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver books is that the heroines have names that might be described as unusual: Dacia, Ravella Dorinda Alida Atalanta Larisa, Canuela. (Our fashion expert Daniel Milford Cottam has a line in inventing names for Cartland, but it is difficult to tell his made-up ones from real ones.)

Ther is another example of plot borrowing, which featured on the blog ages ago, and was actually pointed out by Matthew Sweet.  First of all you need to know about Florence Barclay’s The Rosary: completely forgotten now, but a massive bestseller in the early 1900s. Luckily we have a blogpost:

The Tosh Report: The Rosary by Florence L Barclay

So familiarize yourself with the basic plot, then take a look at this second post:

The National Anthem

Which features the back cover of one of Barbara’s books:

Quite unabashed.

 

I looked at a couple of the contemporary books as well.  I was absolutely startled by one of them: Sweet Punishment, 1931. A young woman Diana is shown as thoughtless and rather selfish.  A man called Ian comes to tell her that his friend Jack died in Africa with her name on his lips: Tell Diana I love her.

Diana scarcely remembers Jack and speaks callously of him, to the horror of Ian. These two attractive creatures now each decide to teach the other a lesson. So Ian abducts Diana, carries her off to his castle on a private Scottish island, and keeps her there against her will. And then he rapes her. Yes, you read that correctly. Repeatedly, night after night. ‘She cried out but there was no-one to hear her, and, helpless, he carried her triumphantly into the shadows of the great bed.’

(It seems the least of the problems with this book, but ‘helpless’ is in the wrong place there)

There is a lot more tosh-related plotting, but as it turns out, they each now love the other. He feels bad about what happened. She loves him anyway.

This was not what I was expecting – and to be fair, they are not all like this. But what about all that virginity Cartland was forever promoting? It seemed rather like an 18^th century novel – all is forgiven because of marriage and respectability. But it still managed to shock me.

It’s really not a nice book.

My verdict in general is this: that she was better at contemporary life than at the Regency ones and other historicals. She pinched from Georgette Heyer like crazy. As Matthew Sweet points out, the books became simpler as time went on – output increased dramatically in later years, and she kept them much simpler, no subplots or extraneous details. Her production rate was much more normal in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. On the cover above, a 1950 reprint, she has only had 30 bestsellers… It was the 1970s when she really started the mass production.

The earlier books, those in the 1930s say, had more interesting details of life – reflecting her own of course, she wasn’t exactly being George Orwell at Wigan Pier. But they are a nice record of what was going on then. I have said that Matthew Sweet’s biography is a great history of the 20^th Century – and that's true also of Barbara Cartland’s novels.